Thursday, March 17, 2011

Schooling at home

One of the most rewarding things so far about schooling at home is watching Hannah as she has progressed from a non-reader/non-writer to a beginning reader/writer. She is left-handed and often has trouble with left/right writing and letter or number formation.

Much of this is developmental and she'll grow out of it. She needs to keep practicing to train her brain and her hand to work together to form characters correctly. I've read and seen that drawing "figure 8's" is one way to reinforce this eye-hand-brain coordination. Occasionally I've set up the big dry erase board so she can full-arm these motions. The other day I had her doing it while I was washing dishes. I sensed somehow (Mommy 6th sense) that those figure 8s weren't forthcoming and I turned around to see this:

"What are you doing? You're supposed to be drawing your figure 8s."

"I'm making a figure 8 person. Its you, mama!"

"Han, draw your 8s please!"

"OK! OK! I'll have to ruin this picture of you, though!"

I mentioned, too, a few posts back that we had been reading through the Old Testament according to Penny Gardner's timeline I found via Ambleside Online. Using some leftover clay and toothpicks I wanted them to build the Tower of Babel, using this kid's model as a guide:

Here's what we got:

Hmmmmmm......

And then, as I think you're supposed to do when studying geography - we made a salt map of the United States. Actually I made the salt map and Han labeled it with our "important" points of reference. (How's Texas lookin atcha?) Pretty good, right?!